News

You might have noticed I've been a bit busy recently releasing some new Nexus sites in to the fold. These aren't really part of any plans of massive expansion, but have merely coincided with one another out of coincidence! I'm thinking that this will be the last one for a little while at least as we focus on rolling out the new site code and features, but don't hold me to that! But anyway, on with the announcement...

Following on the heels of the newly released Mount & Blade Nexus and Neverwinter Nexus, two awesome RPG franchises in their own rights, I'm happy to announce a site that has very little to do with role-playing. That is, unless you like to pretend you're a tank (like me). World of Tanks Nexus is a Nexus site to help support the English speaking World of Tanks modding community.

Never heard of World of Tanks? This is normally the part where I chastise you, but I'll let you off this time. I can't forgive you if you've never heard of Mount & Blade or Neverwinter Nights, but World of Tanks is in a different genre of game, and a relatively new one. In World of Tanks, you are a tank (I'm not joking), and your job is to work with 10 - 16 other team mates to destroy the other team's tanks or capture the enemy team's base by sitting in it for about a minute without being shot.

It's described as an MMO, but not to be confused with an MMORPG; there aren't a few thousands tanks roaming around hills and cities trying to sell their wares or loot the same monsters with slightly different colour schemes like World of Warcraft (except the tanks part..). So what makes it an MMO? First of all, it's online only. Second of all, it's multi-player only. When you want to play, you pick your tank, click the "Battle" button and the game instantly matches you with other tanks of similar tiers to you and away you go. I should note that matchmaking is almost instantaneous; you will never have to wait more than 5 seconds for a match to be ready for you, and they're always full, which is an impressive feat and a testament to how many people play the game which is regularly in the 60,000+ online at any one time range. So if you're the kind of person who likes to play solo and doesn't play multiplayer games much then don't be put off by World of Tanks if the concept interests you; I've been playing this game for almost a year on my own, without any friends (woe is me) and I'm really enjoying it.

Battles follow the Counter-Strike concept, in that once your tank is blown up (dead) that's the end of the round for you. You can carry on watching your team mates who are still alive, or you can leave the battle, jump in another one of your tanks and have another battle. It's this aspect of the game that is so appealing; you're never sat around waiting for a battle to end, even if you die very quickly.

Similarly appealing is the persistent nature of the game. Each battle you fight in provides you with credits and experience depending on how well you did. You can use credits and experience to upgrade your tanks, and once fully upgraded you can move on to the next tier of tank. There are 5 types of tank; SPG/Artillery, Light tanks, Medium Tanks, Heavy Tanks and Tank Destroyers and each has a different role to play on the battle field. Light tanks act as scouts for artillery and other larger tanks, medium tanks are nippy tanks with bigger guns, Heavy tanks have big guns but are cumbersome and Tank Destroyers sit on hills and camp all day. Each class of tank has its own tiers, and you need to research these tiers by using the experience you gain in your battles in order to work your way up the research tech tree to bigger and better tanks. On top of that there are four countries each with their own tanks. American, Russian, French and German tanks all feature, but you don't have to stick to a specific faction of tank and you play with mixed nationalities when you battle. It sounds very complicated, but it's not really, though the game has many, many tanks (most from the WW2 era) so there's always something to work towards. On top of that RPG "levelling" type concept, your tank has crew inside it that also gain experience, making them better and giving them better abilities like repairing damaged components faster or putting out fires faster.

The best news of all is that World of Tanks is completely free to download and play. It has a micro-transaction system that gives you certain benefits, but you don't need to think about that until you've been playing for quite a while (at which point it becomes beneficial to pump a bit of money in to it). So you can definitely try before you buy.

So what can be modded in the game? Typically speaking MMO's can only change aesthetics on the user's own computer like skins and user interface elements, and it's the same for World of Tanks, though some mods can provide really nice benefits over the stock game. New cursors, tank skins, mini-maps and so on and so forth can be modified and added to the game to make a better experience.

I'm aware that up until now the Nexus has mainly focused on RPG's, so it's nice to have a break from the norm and support a different type of game. Plus I've been playing this game to death for the past 10 months (3,500 battles and counting!) so it's always good to support a game you're regularly playing! If you're looking for me, my name is iPokeTanksWithSpoons. Hit me up in game some time. God know's I'm on it enough.